Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals - Hardcover

Beatty, Laura

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1856195139 ISBN 13: 9781856195133

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1999

Synopsis

Lillie Langtry - 'Jersey Lillie' - born, a provincial in 1853, was catapulted by her beauty into the highest society London had to offer. Surrounded by scandal, luxary and gossip, she bacame the mistress of the Prince of Wales, the goddess of Bohemia and the protegée of Oscar Wilde. After four years, she disappeared, bankcrupt, and pregnant with an illegitimate child.

When she resurfaced, guided by Wilde, it was with the masks of several new and invented selves for protection. This book attempts to unravel her complex fictions about herself, to find the person behind the actress, gambler and iconoclast that she then became. At its centre are the previously unpublished letters which she wrote to her childhood friend and secret lover, Arthur Jones, during her period of crisis and collapse. Despairing, fervent and pathetically dependent, these letters reveal a passionate woman for whom the usual charges of coldness and opportunism are by no means the whole story. She died, broken in spirit but world-famous and a millionaire, in 1929.

Laura Beatty captures exactly the spirit of the age, and lifts the masks to reveal the real Lillie.

About this title

Review:

Just the name evokes images of scandal, gossip and decadent beauty. Emily Le Breton was born on Jersey in 1853, the sixth child of the Dean of St Heliers. By the age of 24 she was Lillie Langtry, one of the best-known women in England, whose postcard was sold in every town. The lover of the Prince of Wales (among others), adored by Oscar Wilde, and painted by Millais, she could only fall from grace.

Laura Beatty's imaginative biography concentrates on the tight band of years that cover her ascendancy. 1877 was her annus mirabilis; her entry to London society, after months of waiting to be discovered, was dazzling, and the hordes of journalists and artists that descended termed her variously the Jersey Lily, Venus Annodomini, the modern Helen. What was a girl to do? In her trademark black dress she sat for the painters, simpered for society, and pondered her future. Beatty deals passionately with this time of quandary, as Lillie considers a woman already irrevocably scarred by the public's attentions, resulting in the mix of insecurity and self-confidence necessary for her subsequent career on the stage. Lillie ended her life in comparative calm, successful in business, with, ironically, the companionship of a woman after so many years in the company of increasingly dissolute men.

Lillie Langtry was a beautiful, haunted woman, who became a moderate, if hardworking, actress. Importantly, she survived. By the end of this sympathetic and thoughtful book one is left wondering what she might have achieved had she not been blessed, or cursed, with such a pretty face. --David Vincent

Review:

"The most original and penetrating book on Mrs. Langtry that has been written... fresh and revealing." - "Literary Review""Beatty writes with wit and gusto--The tone of her book - racy, sharp-witted and elegantly aphoristic - is nicely appropriate to its subject matter." - "Sunday Times""From the Trade Paperback edition."

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1856195139
• ISBN 13: 9781856195133
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352